Right after I finished high school I had this plan to go to community college for 2 years to get the basics out of the way and save some money before heading to a 4 year school. Around this time I left the hardware store that I was working at to work at RPS which was Roadway Package System. While I was working there the company was actually bought out by FedEx. I don’t remember how I found out about this job but I remember that I was stoked because they started out at like $9.00 an hour and this was $3.00 more than I was making at the hardware store. Here is the kicker to get to my new found fortune, I would have to drive 30 miles away through lots of construction and lots of traffic. It definitely wasn’t a deal breaker for me. It actually got better because once I actually started I found a few other dudes to car pool with so this helped cut down on the gas side of things.
I remember my first day actually walking into that place for again another orientation. I basically sat through 3 hours of videos what go through things like ethics, some HR stuff and then a lot on workplace safety. This place was pretty dangerous lots of stairs and moving belts and lifting heavy stuff. These safety videos are all pretty stark and heartless but the thing that they probably emphasised the most was to never walk on the moving belt. Over and over again it was don’t walk on the belt, never walk on a moving belt, if the belt is moving never walk on it. This was the safety message over and over and over again. So I finished with my videos and ask the girl at the desk to grab the boss for me. His name was Jim. I was like can you grab Jim for me? She was like I’ll just take you out there. When we walked out there we walked through the warehouse to the far side where all the packages were flowing into the trailers. We walked up the stairs and there was an angled belt that went up next the stairs with packages on it. Once we got up the stairs there was a long belt with 3 other belts parting off of it that went into 3 different trailers. We walked up the stairs and Jim was sitting standing on the far side of the farthest belt. She said ok he’s over there. And I said how to I get over there. She was like “just walk on the belt”. I just laughed and was like, I jumped on the belt and walked over to where he was standing. 
I worked at that location for about a year or so. Working there was awesome.Eventually I recruited a handful of friends to work there and we kind of took over. At the end there were probably like 7 or 8 of us working there that were all friends from the Flint area.
Around this time I was still going to community college and playing shows with my band Spit. I had just finished up my second year at Mott Community College so I was looking kind of toward the future. I applied...
